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Berlin Airlift (1948-49)

News about Berlin Airlift (1948-49), including commentary and archival articles published in The New York Times. More

After World War II, a defeated Germany was divided by the victorious powers of the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain and France into four occupation zones. Deep within the Soviet zone  the eastern part of Germany  lay Berlin, a capital city all but leveled by aerial bombing from American and British bombers and the final terrible battle of the war between Russian and German forces.

Berlin too was divided four ways, and more than two million people lived in its three western sectors. But on June 24, 1948, the Soviet Union cut off the food and supplies that were being carried into those western sectors daily by road, rail, and river barge.

All during the previous year, the Soviets had sponsored coups that had replaced the struggling democracies of the nations of Eastern Europe with puppet regimes — and the eyes of the world had been focused on Berlin with the knowledge that the Soviets would intervene there next. Berlin would be where the U.S. and U.S.S.R. would face off, and the Soviet advance across the continent would be halted or allowed.

When the Soviet blockade began, almost all observers believed America had one of three choices: retreat from Berlin (the option favored by almost all of President Harry Truman’s top military and diplomatic advisers), push an armed convoy through the blockade and risk World War III (the option favored by the American military governor of Germany, Gen. Lucius Clay), or watch as the Berliners steadily starved once the three weeks of stockpiled rations were used up.

But during the discussions, a decision was made as an afterthought to fill the few dozen C-47 transport planes in Europe with supplies — each about the size of a school bus — and send them from western Germany to West Berlin as a way of buying some time before a decision was made. The flights were supposed to last just for a few days or a few weeks, but the Berlin airlift continued through one of the foggiest winters in European history and kept the city’s residents alive. Almost no one in the world thought such a feat was possible. In May of 1949, after nearly eleven months, the Soviets lifted the blockade.

The Berlin airlift was the closest the United States ever came to World War III (closer even than the Cuban missile crisis). But as a result of the airlift, America’s failing occupation of Germany turned around.

It was the turning point in the German people’s attitudes toward democracy, which had been unpopular. And it was the moment when the United States first learned how to function at the summit of world power and became admired and beloved around the world.